Prelude

In this experiment, our intention was to test the impact how elders react in Elementary OS in order to find:

• How much impact has good design on easiness and accessibility to elders which might have difficulties with standard OSs interfaces
• How much  trouble a person with just basic knowledge had when changing to ElementaryOS as we wanted to measure whether people’s fear when changing to ElementaryOS was real or not.

For the experiment five people were used, they were not selected specially, just they were part of a computer science group.

The range of ages of the people involved were from 65 to 78. The experiment lasted an hour, and some of the tasks originally proposed couldn’t be completed, and two of them had to leave before time so they didn’t had time to finish what others, also for the other three, the CD freezed when logging out, since we didn’t had enough time the experiment finished there. The CD used for the experiment was ElementaryOS 0.3 beta 2.

Before the experiment a five minute talk about how the desktop worked (the applications menu and the dock) was given in order to bootstrap their knowledge.

Note: Since the subjects knew each other so they tended to tell the others what to do in case they were stuck. However, this was corrected as much as possible.

There are two califiction about the subjects, the first one is a personal one where they were given a scale where 1 was “I can turn on the computer, does that count?” and 5 was “I can work on the computer pretty much alone”. Also, the teacher (the one doing this experiment), rated them in how they were against “standard” elders.

Results

The results are available in https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DpcvGjX06ZchcZuQ5MmXStVQywwdUUrS7VWxKvIckzs/pubhtml

Conclusion

Considering those same elders have been troubled with their daily OS (namely Windows 7) and they have had trouble to open even the web browser used in the classes (Chrome and Firefox), it’s really incredible how with just a five minute talk they were able to work quite comfortably in the OS with little to no help.

So we conclude  the design impacts not only the learning curve, but also accessibility for those with difficulties with computers, also, this dissolves any worries about whether one might be capable of working in ElementaryOS as long as some sort of guide (preferibly a visual one: either one with images or a video) is availabe.